Butt Out: There's No Room for Politcis in a Gentlemen's Game

There is an old bit of wisdom that says sport and politics shouldn’t mix. While it’s a nice sentiment, the truth is that the two are invariably inextricably linked, with sport often ending up as a tool of international ‘diplomacy’.

The Olympics are the most frequently used tool of international blackmail – the American and Soviet boycotts of the 1980s are a prime example – but they are by no means the only example of interference. Sometimes the motives are pure, like in the sporting boycott imposed on South Africa at the height of apartheid.

No matter what the motives, these political incursions are rarely welcome and even more rarely achieve their stated goals – the Soviets didn’t leave Afghanistan because the United States refused to attend the Moscow Olympics.

The latest ham-fisted efforts have both come to light on the same day; one out of Pakistan and the other, slightly more disturbing one, out of India.

The Chairman of Pakistan’s lower house standing committee on sports, Jamshed Dasti, has recommended a clean-out of the senior ranks of the Pakistan Cricket Board in the wake of the complete lack of recent successes.

The team has not won a test series since 2006.

Not that everything is a complete disaster. Pakistan squared the series against New Zealand late last year and should have squared the series against Australia in Sydney recently.

To lay the blame for failure at the feet of Ijaz Butt, Wasim Bari, Zakir Khan and Itikhab Alam is ridiculous. It was the players who choked in Sydney. There is little a national board can do in the middle of a test match.

Then again, this is the same person who accused his own team of match fixing in the wake of Pakistan’s inglorious exit from the Champion’s Trophy which, in turn, led to Younis Khan’s departure from the national side.

Dasti obviously has a bit of an axe to grind, but the side has enough to deal with, without unwelcome carping from a political hack.

Dasti went on further to attack Butt personally claiming that he was “physically unfit, he can't even walk properly, he can't even see properly”.

He went on further to also accuse Butt of having “done nothing to help in finding what went wrong when gunmen attacked the Sri Lankan team in Lahore last year”.

Wouldn’t chasing down terrorists be a government function, not one for the PCB?

Of course, Pakistan in now a nation that no longer plays its home games in Pakistan. Despite this, they are still performing credibly. They pushed Australia much harder than anyone would have dared expect.

Let’s hope that Pakistan’s President and Patron of the PCB, Zadari, is a bit more rational than the relevance starved Dasti.

More disturbing than Dasti’s unwelcome meddling is threats by one of India’s right-wing extremist political parties, Shiv Sena, that they “will not allow kangaroo cricketers to play in Mumbai and Maharashtra till the attacks are stopped on Indians''.

While there has been no threat of violence against Australians, Shiv Sena has managed to disrupt games before and has been implicated in violence against Muslims. It is a troubling development, more so because it comes from a political party and one that has significant influence.

So much for cricket being the gentlemen’s game.